Wisdom is not developable, as if it's a matter of luck or personality or genetics. Well it's just not the case. Wisdom involves our accumulated knowledge about a subject but also a reverence for life, for an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.

We know that uncertainty creates anxiety and sometimes desperate attempts to find something to believe in. Uncertainty engenders real opportunity as well as misleading choices, great leaders as well as false messiahs, and new ways of understanding the world alongside hollow maxims and deceptive promises. Understandably, we seek guides and guideposts to ease the anxiety of the journey. But we also need to depend on our own insights and imagination to cultivate, from our own experience, a way to move forward.

Wisdom in groups is earned by gathering useful data, exploring diverse perspectives, respecting different viewpoints, and then shaped through critical reflection on behalf of tangible outcomes.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

Our characterization of collective folly is that sound judgment is not feasible when there is forced or false agreement in groups. We also show how group polarization sets the stage for risky and even dangerous decisions to be made. How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term - whether for efficiency or profitability - can lead to disasters in the long term in financial, ecological, political, social, and spiritual spheres.

Wisdom is not developable, as if it's a matter of luck or personality or genetics. Well it's just not the case. Wisdom involves our accumulated knowledge about a subject but also a reverence for life, for an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.